


pallidula, rigida, nudula

by nestorius



Category: Ancient History RPF, Classical Greece and Rome History & Literature RPF
Genre: Age Difference, Extremely Dubious Consent, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, Kidnapping, M/M, One-Sided Relationship, Past Abuse, Past Underage
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-08
Updated: 2016-02-08
Packaged: 2018-05-19 01:01:46
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death, Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,138
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5950279
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nestorius/pseuds/nestorius
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A god descends.</p>
            </blockquote>





	pallidula, rigida, nudula

When I first saw the statue of myself, I laughed. Stood there in the market with my patchy sandals and rough hands and laughed till I could laugh no more. Laughed till the flowing tears made me retch. Those around me must have assumed I was having a fit, or that I was caught in some paroxysm of religious ecstasy for this new god - in any case they let me be and eventually I could stagger back home, needles in my sides.

_Silly man_ , I said in my head as I sorted through the money I'd earned that day. Distance and time had made him almost sweet. _I knew I had power over you, but not like this!_

For his line waits till death before the Eagle takes them, and here am I, a living god.

//

That was two years ago. These marble paths I have not trod in much longer. These cool tiles, this glorious labyrinth with its beautiful monster in the center. There is a certain weird glee to see it, a sweetness overtaking the sour that now builds on my tongue. I have gilded enough hands to pass unmolested through its spaces. Its new spaces. I am not quite lost. I know its bones but the flesh had not quite formed before I saw it last. A turn down a corridor and I laugh despite myself. There I am again. There I am at half-size, painted marble, stones for my eyes. I stand on an altar in front of an incense censer and look down.

He flatters me. My hair would never cooperate for that crown. It's dark and sticks up in places.

But he hasn't exaggerated much. Or he paid a sculptor not to exaggerate. I don't touch the little thing - funny as it may be, it's still a little creepy. I crouch, not in supplication but to look at it. He's done the jaw fair enough, the nose. I still have the brows. Those full lips. I took pains to shave these past few days so I have the smoothness. Nearly a decade after the river and I still have the gangliness of a boy creeping up to man, though of late that has finally begun to change. Rome's softness wearing off.

I do Rome a disservice. It's a hard enough place.

Another corridor. I wend and wind and finally it's there. No guard. No physician standing careful watch. They've given up, I see. He's written his desires and they don't care what happens to him. I part the curtain and come in.

The bed. I remember that bed. The mattress stuffed with goose down, the fulcra in ivory. The carved posts. Hot nights I'd lie on the cool tiled floor and run my hand over the faces on the legs. Gods, I knew not which. I prayed to them anyway, out of desperation long since morphed into habit.

And I remember the form on the bed.

I'm afraid it's not sleep. That I'll lean over to whisper and hear no reply but eagle feathers shuffling at a distance. But his chest rises and his chest falls and there is an impossible wetness at my eyes.

I find a chair and I sit. I observe.

He sleeps as he always slept, partly on his side with his legs folded over. Mouth tipped to the side, a little open. I can hear him breathing. For a dying man he doesn't look dying. Ashen, yes, lips blue, but besides that, he's not so old that he's wasted. There are muscles still, a broad chest. A touch of silver at the temples and the neat beard but he could live another twenty years if the gods saw fit. But they've crushed his heart, poor thing.

An emperor should take care of his mind and I'm sure he did that. But his heart, his heart. All these years I can't decide if it was too big or too small. The man who wept at poetry and theatre and the first blooms of spring grabbed my wrists and put his forehead against mine and wept some more. "Beloved, beloved, I beg, be happy. What do you want?"

"Take me home," I'd say. I'd scream, more like, and go to gouge at his eyes.

"You are home," he said, and his words echoed off whatever decadent prison he'd held me in that night. And as I grew older I understood that he believed it. But as a child I mistook his naivete for evil. And so I'd go for his eyes again.

In the night, as he slept beside me, armed guards at our door so I could never think of trying escape, I blamed my sister. My sister the witch. She collected dove's hearts and made potions for sad women and lovestruck men. She inscribed curses on lead tablets, buried fetishes, burned stolen hair, examined the entrails of birds. And the week before the emperor came up the hill she made an elaborate dinner for her pug-faced husband. Told me not to touch his dish. I ate my coarse bread dipped in clouded olive oil and watched her watch him eat. Her beautiful face not tilted down demurely but tipped up to stare straight at him. A smile on her lips. A satchel of herbs she'd tied on the largest bruise looking like some rare gem, so radiant was she. We buried him before the sun came up. She scraped the blood he'd vomited from the table and collected it in a little jar. "For luck," she said.

(When I made it back to Bithynia I found our farm abandoned. The emperor's edifications had done much in ten years. Brought riches to the city and farmers out of the brush. Where a witch might be, I had no idea. I found her husband's shallow grave and pissed in it. Habit. And a prayer for her safety. May his bones be crushed.)

A witch buys her own fortune at the expense of another's. It would have been better if she had acquiesced to his demands and sold me at market price. Perhaps if he'd bought me I'd have been resigned to my fate. Would have accepted my role and eventually noticed that he did indeed care for me. That dripping with rare oils and chained and gold could be better than breaking my back and my hands tearing down more forest to plant. Instead, after the novelty wore off, I always looked back over my shoulder. East for the rising sun and for home.

But a little witch like my sister couldn't have enough power to sway the heart of an emperor. We were destined, it seems. He used to tell me that when he looked down the hill to see me bare-chested in the dirt grubbing for hazelnuts he genuinely thought he'd seen some kind of dryad. Thought perhaps that the groves of the east grew faunlets to tend them rather than nymphs. Thought he should usher his horse away or say a prayer.

He meant it, too.

He shifts, now, under his silk sheet. My eyes are still wet. Hatred? Love? I've long since stopped trying to parse them out. He's infected me with his inability to feel emotion correctly. An emperor should be stoic and cold as alabaster. He threw inkpots at courtiers. Whatever singular emotions I have for him have melted into formless shape. He is who he is and that is how I feel about him. The highs (his lips at my back in the high summer through every golden wood his empire had to offer) should not be able to coexist with the lows (with him bloodied of chest and arm after prising a knife out of my red hands, me having gashed inexpertly at every vein I could see) and yet they do.

Given his approaching death I think I can call myself fond. Look at his hands open by his cheek. Their creases. The skin dry and hot. The fingertips dark like his lips. They'd be cold to touch. They used to be cold to the touch. A thumb on the nape of my neck, another fingertip down my spine. A blind man touching finest glassware. Delicate and wanting.

The hands twitch. He's drifting awake. I recognize the symptoms. He'll lick his lips, and yes, there comes the muttering. No words in any language known to man. The eyes flutter. I push myself out of the chair and stand like any bodyguard, at attention, and he flutters shut again and rolls his head.

"Water, please," he says, in his soft Latin.

There's a jug on his bedside table. A goblet. I busy myself with that as he props himself up. I might have misjudged his vigor. There's a knot in his lungs. He takes the proffered goblet both hands, eyes still closed, and drinks like a man in the desert. He has to take a deep breath when he finishes and it catches somewhere deep down. Not a cough caught but a slow decline. A chariot already braked but still trailing its last few ells before coming to a rest.

I lean over to take the goblet from him and our fingers touch. He looks up, blinking bleary sleep away, and the breath stutters. His eyes are clear as day now, still that pretty hazel, and his lips have parted.

I remember that look. That awe. I stood at the mouth of the Nile with him and it passed on his face like the sun breaking through on a cloudy day. That childlike wonder struck through with fear.

And I've chosen well, I know, how I've come in to him. Despite everything I loved the bangles and rings, the gold shining at my throat. I had to sell most of it once I climbed out of the Nile but eight years scribing in three tongues earned facsimiles back. I am golden in the sunlight as I was that day. He slept under the shade of the canopy and the slaves nodded in the noonday sun. I slipped into the water like an otter and we were close enough to shore that I could make it without pestering a crocodile. I'd had vague plans to find a boy my age and complexion but we hadn't been in Egypt long and I hadn't bronzed like a local. And, later, swaying on a wretched boat carrying spice to Cyprus, I reasoned that he wouldn't have been fooled anyway. Even with a throat slit or a face disfigured. Better to just disappear.

I who was taken by the water am back to quench his thirst at his dying. I refill the goblet and take a sip. Cool, still, and strung with some sort of herb. A painkiller, I suppose. I pivot back on my heel to see that there are tears forming at his crow's feet.

"Osiris" comes out of his slack mouth.

Is that who I'm supposed to be? Osiris, the Pluto in the desert. Rich and beautiful and sad. Oh sweetness. I haven't been sad in eight years.

"The eagle has come to take me," he hazards.

I smile. He straightens to sit up properly. Brushes at his eyes. Emperor pose - hawk eyes, head tipped back to look down, though I am standing up. He closes his eyes. Attempts a wry smile. "I suppose there's no diplomacy here."

"Not as such," I say, in Latin.

He nods. He is silent, breathing and watching me.

He was never silent. He talked all the time. He chose his words well when needed but with me, in the loneliness of our cages, they spilled out of him, unstoppable. He told me of my beauty and my insolence and the shape of the stars over his childhood home in Iberia. He rarely drowned himself in wine but I'd take his cups from him. I swiped pomegranate juice on my skin, a threat and a promise. Depending on the night he'd brush his lips to where I had gone or press wet cloths and look at me with his pleading eyes. Either way he'd talk. Always pleading.

And then in the dark back to talking of stars in Iberia. He had a nick in his Latin, smaller than the crackle in his Greek but all the louder, a tiny red stain in a field of white.

"I hope I am found worthy," he says. He's trying to meet my eyes. I won't let him and he's curious about it, but as far as I remember he never had an ego to mock the gods. (Unless concerning his art).

"You already have been."

He smiles. He has a nice smile, still.

"You brought me to godhood eight years ago," I say, and he preens, almost. "That was kind of you. And now..."

He gives me an expectant look.

"I'm returning the favor," I say. Not in Latin but in Greek. And not in the high Greek favored in Rome but the battered tongue of my childhood and my return. The one thick with farmyard reek, speckled here and there by old dead tongues. The tongue I screamed in when I was fourteen and fifteen and sixteen and enraged. Take me home. Take me back. "We killed lions for daring to increase our imagined majesty. I may be a living god but oh, Publius, my friend, lord of all he surveys, you'll mean so much more."

He stares at me, glassy-eyed. I wonder if he thinks a god should speak in Rome's raised language. Am I intruding on his beliefs? Or has he recognized my accent and called it divine? But no - his breath catches, again and again.

"Antinous," he says.

I come close to him, my thighs pressed against the bed.

"Antinous," and he has strength enough to bury his head in his hands. His breath comes in jagged peaks.

"Look at me," and when he doesn't part his hands from his eyes I take his wrists much as he used to take mine and pull them away. A god should not have warm hands, or a rough patch where the stylus rests, or a new scar at the place where shoulder meets neck. He takes everything in. The rise and fall of my chest. That I blink. The brief shock of me touching him freezes his tears and then they come out again in a long stream. He sobs silently, his shoulders hitching up and down.

"I thought I'd lost you," he manages. "I would have dredged the whole Nile had they let me. They had to fish me out. They - "

He breaks to cry. Tender heart. I wait for him to stop snorting and he curls his hands into fists and his eyes are shards of glass in my soul. Or they desperately want to be. I have a barrier of stone when it comes to that flecked hazel.

A deep breath to steel himself. "My beloved. Where did you go?"

"I went home," I say, gently as I can.

He turns to alabaster. And then he flinches such that the bed taps against the wall.

(Good to know I can still do that to him.)

When I release his wrists he lets his arms fall to his side. Still weeping, he is, and there's no indication he'll stop, but he's brave enough to meet my eyes.

"I'm sorry," he whispers.

I sit on the edge of his bed. I remember this mattress, its goosedown scented with lavender. I stroke his ashen forehead.

"I could never forgive you," I say. "Do you understand that? Do you understand why?"

"I love you," he cries, loud enough to make me wince. There are no guards but there might be some if they hear the emperor wailing. I take his hand in mine and he almost calms. A baby in the cradle yearning for touch.

"I never doubted that," I say. "You love me after your fashion. And somewhere in me there is love for you. You knew that."

"I knew it," he echoes.

"But you understand."

A great hideous sob and he nods. He understands.

I straddle him. He sinks back into his pillows. My hands on his arms. My lips to his ear.

"Let me make you a god, Publius Aelius Hadrianus," I say.

He sighs out - to aid me, I think - and he closes his eyes.

I'm not cruel. I put my mouth on his. A gift. Dropsical as he is he could easily unpluck my hand from where it's holding his nostrils shut. Could easily call for a guard. The most he does his lift his head to meet me.

A thousand lifetimes ago, in some beachside villa, I crouched in the corner of a room at midnight. The stars out and a moon punching a blinding white hole in a black sky. He sat in the corner across from me. I'd done my normal tantrum and it had exhausted me. He waited and eventually I crawled over to him and he held me. Rocking me like a baby. He couldn't sing but he sang anyway, bare above a whisper as not to offend my ears, in a language I did not understand but knew was the expansion of the nick on his Latin. I kissed him and he kissed me and I clawed at his back and hissed at him to carry me to bed. I tore bloody streaks down his arms and chest and afterwards he kissed my fingers.

"I am so alone without you," he said, his head burrowed in my chest. He spoke so softly I could barely hear him over the slop of the waves against the steps outside.

If I am a god I will send him to suffer the whips of the Erinyes. If I am a man I will remember his gentleness. How he offered himself to judgment and murder.

Perhaps if I die I will meet him again.

Perhaps in death he will no longer be lonely.

He breathes no more. I fit fingers against veins in a neck I have longed to slit or kiss or both. Not even the threadiness of the dropsical heart do I feel.

He's gone.

I slip out of his bed. He has a seal ring on his finger and I take it off and place it on the table with the pitcher. His fingers will swell and they'd have had to cut to get it off if I'd left it.

There are always ships going to Bithynia. I have a fair amount of gold still on my neck. Or I have the look of the god on the altar outside of the emperor's chambers. Never again will I come back to Rome.

I don't bother saying goodbye to his corpse.

**Author's Note:**

> Wrote this like two years ago and posted it elsewhere; it's here now. Um. Marguerite Yourcenar had a big hand in this but this isn't really fic of Memoirs but she still needs some credit.


End file.
